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Twitter May Soon Be More Valuable Than a Firm That Runs Diamond Mines

Scott Lucas | Photo: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons | October 24, 2013

Also Dole and WD-40. But it'll be tied with Crocs.

Today, Twitter announced that it would sell 70 million shares in a price range between $17 and $20 a share when it goes public next month. That puts its market capitalization at around $1.3 billion (assuming a price per share in the middle of the range—$18.50). So what companies would Twitter be richer than?

Well, for one, it would mean Twitter is worth more than a literal diamond mine: Dominion Diamond Corporation, a Canadian firm that owns interest in two of the world's largest diamond mines, has a market cap of only $1.2 billion. And that's the largest number for any publicly traded diamond mining company. (Does that means that when you tweet about the totally incredible banh mi you had for lunch, it is worth more than a diamond? —No, ed.)

Some other of the other surprising companies that Twitter would outpace?

Try Dole Foods ($1.2 billion) and WD-40 Company ($1.1 billion). Twitter's market cap would be about equal to Crocs ($1.3 billion) and OfficeMax ($1.3 billion), and just shy of Revlon and Sketchers ($1.4 billion each). But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves—it'll also be less valuable than such exotic entities as China Eastern Airlines and El Pas Electric ($1.4 billion each.).

So where would Twitter fit in the grand scheme of corporate things? Not so great. It's dwarfed by the super giants like Apple ($416 billion), Exxon ($404 billion), Google ($263 billion), and Berkshire Hathaway ($257 billion).